1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a household electric user having an electronic control, and to a control and programming system thereof.
2. Background Information
It is known that the components of certain household electric users, such as household appliances, are subject to wear and occasional faults and that in consequence of such faults repair operations are required in daily practice.
It is also known that some household appliances may be equipped with a sophisticated electronic control system, which is capable of identifying the nature of some type of malfunctions and signal them appropriately, so as to ensure a subsequent easier repair operation.
For instance, from document WO9943068, to which reference can be made for more details, a set of household appliances connected in a network is disclosed, where such appliances are programmed for generating information of various type, which are useful for the person using the appliance (hereinafter referred to as “consumer”) and/or the serviceman called for maintenance or technical service of such appliances.
According to the system described in the above document a special monitoring device is connected to the network for collecting from it, and partially store, information that each appliance is in a position to generate, namely:    a) functional information, i.e. relating to the current operating mode of the household appliance;    b) diagnostic information. i.e. relating to the efficiency status of determined mechanical and electrical components of the household appliance;    c) statistical information, i.e. relating to operating statistical data of the household appliance, which therefore indicate the wear status of the above mechanical and electrical components.
As a result, through the above monitoring device, the consumer is in the condition of checking from one sole location in the home, and by virtue of said functional information, the operating status of all household appliances connected to the network; the monitoring device also has the important function of facilitating the technical servicing of the appliances, through the availability of the diagnostic and statistical data generated by the appliances and stored by the monitoring device itself, which can be accessed by the maintenance and service personnel.
According to the solution described in WO9943068, the information under point c) consist of data being essentially statistical relating to the appliance operation, which therefore form a sort of “summary” of the activity performed of the appliance, in terms of operations and/or function carried out and in terms of mode of use by the consumer, since its installation date.
For instance, in the case of a laundry washing machine, the statistical information provided by WO9943068 refer to the total number and/or the type of wash cycles selected by the consumer, the number of washings associated to the various types of fabric, the quantity of clothes washed on average for each type of fabric, the wash temperatures and the spinning speeds selected by the consumer on average, the water hardness mean value, the number of rinses on average, etc.
Therefore, the above statistical data are represented by simple absolute or mean values, which are gradually updated in time by the appliance control system; it is in fact clear how, for instance, following the continuous use of the washing machine, statistical data such as the total number of wash cycles executed, the total number of washes associated to a specific fabric type, the mean value of the wash temperature, the mean quantity of washed clothes, the mean value of the water hardness, and so on, will be continuously amended and updated in the time.
The above statistical information are very useful, due to their specific nature, to give indications on the wear status of the various components of the appliance and to a certain extent make the maintenance operations easier, especially in view of its preventive maintenance; however, such information have the drawback of being “aggregated” information, i.e. they consist of data that cannot supply detailed indications and which cannot, consequently, be interpreted and used for the purposes of identifying exactly and directly the origin of a malfunction and/or fault of the household appliance.
To this effect, it should be pointed out that also diagnostic information as mentioned above under point b) may not be sufficient to that purpose.
In fact, although said diagnostic information are provided for giving indication on the efficiency status of certain internal components of a household appliance, they are anyway always expressed by the value of a predefined set of typical operating parameters of the household appliance itself, and therefore they are unable to reflect all possible malfunction and/or fault cases (for example, in the case of a freezer, typical diagnostic information relate to the number of times the preservation temperature reached values being less colder than a preset value, the number of power mains blackouts, the number of times a compressor protector operated, etc.).
Therefore, in other terms, also the diagnostic information provided by WO9943068, surely useful for a fast analysis of specific operating alterations of the appliance, are not useful for detecting other and different types of faults or malfunctions.